Greenwald, who of course broke the Edward Snowden story for the Guardian last year, is right that the official photos of the event made the president look lacking in American spirit:

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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It turns out that Obama’s communications team staged a much showier presentation to demonstrate the president’s zeal for protecting America, but the original background was photoshopped in order to better match our skewed contemporary ideals of feminine beauty.

We were able to get our hands on the unretouched photos of the event. Here is the president at the beginning of the speech walking through the history of the NSA and why he believes this country needs it as a surveillance apparatus: